Hegemony

Hegemony, the dominance of one group over another, often supported by legitimating norms and ideas. The term hegemony is today often used as shorthand to describe the relatively dominant position of a particular set of ideas and their associated tendency to become commonsensical and intuitive, thereby inhibiting the dissemination or even the articulation of alternative ideas. The associated term hegemon is used to identify the actor, group, class, or state that exercises hegemonic power or that is responsible for the dissemination of hegemonic ideas.

Hegemony derives from a Greek term that translates simply as “dominance over” and that was used to describe relations between city-states. Its use in political analysis was somewhat limited until its intensive discussion by the Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony followed from his attempts to understand the survival of the capitalist state in the most-advanced Western countries. As a follower of Karl Marx, Gramsci understood the predominant mode of rule as class rule and was interested in explaining the ways in which concrete institutional forms and material relations of production came to prominence. The supremacy of a class and thus the reproduction of its associated mode of production could be obtained by brute domination or coercion. Yet, Gramsci’s key observation was that in advanced capitalist societies the perpetuation of class rule was achieved through largely consensual means—through intellectual and moral leadership. Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony thus involves an analysis of the ways in which such capitalist ideas are disseminated and accepted as commonsensical and normal. A hegemonic class is one that is able to attain the consent of other social forces, and the retention of this consent is an ongoing project. To secure this consent requires a group to understand its own interests in relation to the mode of production, as well as the motivations, aspirations, and interests of other groups. Under capitalism, Gramsci observed the relentless contribution of civil society institutions to the shaping of mass cognitions. Via his concept of the national-popular, he also showed how hegemony required the articulation and distribution of popular ideas beyond narrow class interests.

Gramsci’s analysis of bourgeois hegemony was grounded in detailed historical analysis, but it also carried clear implications for revolutionary socialist strategy. The acquisition of consent before gaining power is an obvious implication, and here Gramsci offered a distinction between two strategies: war of maneuver (in essence a full frontal assault on the bourgeois state) and war of position (engagement with and subversion of the mechanisms of bourgeois ideological domination). But it is important to recognize that Gramsci understood hegemony not simply in terms of ideas but also in relation to processes of production.

One of the most-extensive applications of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony has been to the analysis of international relations and international political economy, via the so-called transnational historical materialism. Scholars within this tradition have been careful to distinguish their project from the way hegemony has been used within orthodox (predominantly) realist international relations (IR). In state-centred IR analysis, hegemony denotes the existence within the international system of a dominant state or group of states. In the branch of realist analysis known as hegemonic stability theory, the presence of a hegemon (say, Britain in the 19th century and the United States after 1945) generates patterns of stability within the international system. The hegemon has a self-interest in the preservation of the system and is, therefore, prepared to underwrite the system’s security with its military might. At the same time, the hegemon is responsible for the formulation of the rules that govern interaction within the international system.

The transnational historical materialist school sees states as important components of hegemonic orders but associates hegemony with the economic, political, and social structures that facilitate particular patterns of production within the world economy. These world orders function via the propagation of rules and norms, many of which are given legitimacy through international organizations and institutions and of which the most crucial tend to govern the conduct of monetary and trade relations. International institutions are thus seen as either conduits for the legitimation of particular regimes of capitalist accumulation or devices to absorb potentially counter-hegemonic ideas and social forces. Thus, for instance, the hegemonic order of the 19th century was underwritten by institutions such as the gold standard and norms such as free trade, as well as by British military power and the global reach of the British imperium.